Stevo Pendarovski was born on April 3rd 1963 in Skopje. He graduated political sciences at the Skopje university and has a Master’s in sociology from the same university.

His career began in the Interior MInistry, where he was promoted as head of the analytics department in 1998. In 2001, during the Albanian insurgency, he was appointed Ministry spokesman which made him publicly recognizeable and started his political career.

After the war, President Boris Trajkovski had him on as national security adviser. After Trajkovski’s untimely death in a plane crash near Mostar, Pendarovski was appointed head of the State Electoral Commission and presided over the presidential elections when Prime Minister and SDSM leader Branko Crvenkovski was elected as President. Similarly to Pendarovski’s win, with exceptionally high support levels from Albanian voters, Crvenkovski was also elected with the same base of support – in his case with rampant ballot stuffing to reach the 50 percent electoral turnout requirement. The practice was noted by the OSCE observer mission but the election was allowed to stand by Pendarovski’s Commission.

Pendarovski remained as head of the Electoral Commission during the 2004 referendum organized by VMRO-DPMNE to try and stop a law that redraw municipal borders which turned Struga and Kicevo into majority Albanian cities. The Commission when he condoned the practice of intimidation of public service employees who were urged not to vote in the referendum, and it failed due to low turnout.

In 2005, President Crvenkovski repaid the favor to Pendarovski and appointed him his foreign affairs adviser, giving Pendarovski the dubious honor of serving two Presidents from two competing political parties. In Crvenkovski’s office, Pendarovski was one of the point men on the endless name issue talks.

Shortly before Crvenkovski’s term ended Pendarovski moved to the American College – Skopje where he taught international security and international relations for 11 years. In 2014 Pendarovski ran for President but lost to Gjorge Ivanov, who then secured his second term. Pendarovski dismissed the election results and accused Ivanov of fraud. He was active in the SDSM led Colored Revolution which began in 2015 and led the SDSM party list for Skopje in the 2016 elections – the only list where SDSM actually beat VMRO in those elections due to the high concentration of urban voters – but quickly gave up on his seat in Parliament and asked to be appointed NATO coordinator.

Stevo Pendarovski is married and has one son.